1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method utilized in a wireless communication system and communication device thereof, and more particularly, to a method of configuring timing resource for a wireless communication system supporting device to device communication and communication device thereof.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A long-term evolution (LTE) system supporting the 3GPP Rel-8 standard and/or the 3GPP Rel-9 standard are developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a successor of a universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) for further enhancing performance of the UMTS to satisfy increasing needs of users. The LTE system includes a new radio interface and a new radio network architecture that provides high data rate, low latency, packet optimization, and improved system capacity and coverage. In the LTE system, a radio access network known as an evolved universal terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) includes multiple evolved Node-Bs (eNBs) for communicating with multiple user equipments (UEs), and communicating with a core network including a mobility management entity (MME), a serving gateway, etc., for Non-Access Stratum (NAS) control.
An LTE-advanced (LTE-A) system, as its name implies, is an evolution of the LTE system. The LTE-A system targets faster switching between power states, improves performance at the coverage edge of an eNB, and includes advanced techniques, such as carrier aggregation (CA), coordinated multipoint transmission/reception (CoMP), uplink (UL) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), etc. For a UE and an eNB to communicate with each other in the LTE-A system, the UE and the eNB must support standards developed for the LTE-A system, such as the 3GPP Rel-10 standard or later versions.
Starting from 3GPP Rel-12, a feature is included to allow UEs to communicate with each other directly, which is referred to as device to device (D2D) communication or Proximity-based Services (ProSe) communication. The D2D communication finds its applications on areas including Public Safety and non-Public-Safety services that would be of interest to operators and users. Proximity-based applications and services represent an emerging social-technological trend. The introduction of the D2D communication capability in LTE would allow the 3GPP industry to serve this developing market, and will, at the same time, serve the urgent needs of several Public Safety communities that are jointly committed to LTE.
In a half-duplex system, the UE is unable to transmit and receive at the same time. Therefore, when the UE is operated in a time division duplexing (TDD) mode, the UE cannot transmit data to the eNB while receiving data from other UEs at the same time, and vice versa. If both transmission and reception of D2D communication are carried on an uplink (UL) resource, reception of D2D communication might happen at the same time with normal UL transmission (i.e. UE to network transmission), and thus data collision may occur.
Therefore, how to configure timing resource in device to device (D2D) communication so as to avoid data collision is an important topic to be addressed and discussed in the art.